One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2014 was to read and see six Shakespeare plays. I kept the resolution, and decided to repeat it in 2015. So far, I’m a bit behind schedule, but I recently saw my first play this year, As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre.
It might be a bias in the plays I’m choosing (I’m focusing mainly on comedies), but I’m developing a theory that there’s one major theme which runs through all of Shakespeare’s work. Yes, he deals with all of the big dramas of human experience at one point or another: love and friendship, war and death, money and power, ambition and jealousy. But there’s one particular obsession which is always present, whatever else is going on: what I’m coming to think of as the Grand Theme.
